– The artistic head of the biggest animation gathering in the world offers his informed view on selection trends, the current economic state of affairs, and artificial intelligence
With just three days to go until the 45th Annecy Animated Film Festival (directed by Mickaël Marin and unspooling between 21 and 27 June) gets underway, we met with Marcel Jean who’s been the artistic director of the event since 2013.
Cineuropa: Was your 2026 selection easy to put together? What key trends are you picking up on?
Marcel Jean: The selection process was complicated due to the rise in the average quality of feature films. Eight or nine years ago, we’d sometimes accept films almost by default. That’s no longer the case: there’s real competition for a place in the festival line-up. This evolution is noticeable in the biggest producing countries, such as France, for example, as well as in various other regions, in Europe and beyond. Lots of Asian countries, in particular, are entering the fray. For a long time, animation in Asia was limited to Japan, then it was Japan and India, and now Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, etc., are all throwing their hats into the ring. This year, in the Annecy Presents section, we’ve got the first ever stop-motion feature film in the history of New Zealand cinema. And lots of feature films are coming to us from Latin America too. In Europe, feature films have been coming from the Baltic countries over the past few years; Scandinavia has been a hotbed for producing feature films for young audiences for some time now, no to mention the more obvious countries, like Italy, Germany, Spain and England, and, around France, Luxembourg and Belgium which are very active, especially in co-production. Basically, we’re seeing a growing number of high-quality films. There’s more expertise pretty much all over the world in terms of screenwriting and techniques, which helps feature films go the distance. And short films are getting longer and longer (15 minutes, on average, as opposed to 8 minutes fifteen or so years ago), with larger narrative ambitions and the hope or a plan to make a feature film, which wasn’t the case for a very long time: if you were an animated short film director, that’s what you stayed, whereas these days, every year we see a handful of filmmakers known for their short films making the leap to feature films. This year, in L’Officielle, we’ve got Viva Carmen, which is the 3rd feature film by Sébastien Laudenbach who I knew as a short film director for 25 years, and it’s a similar situation for Spanish director Alberto Vasquez (who’s in the line-up with Decorado).
Isn’t this profusion of productions somewhat ironic, since there’s talk of the animation sector experiencing funding issues?
There’s been huge growth in the sector, and it’s come very quickly over the past few years, especially with the arrival of platforms and all the money that came with the pandemic. For the past three years, there’s been a bit of an undertow, which has complicated funding and weakened companies which had invested heavily in developing their technical infrastructure or hiring staff. That’s created ripples throughout the industry. But technological evolutions and filmmakers’ ability to work independently have also helped us to produce films which are pretty much made on the fringes of the industry but which can be really successful, such as Gints Zilbalodis’ famous work Flow, which had a very small budget and which was a second feature film by a director who’d made his first feature (Away) all by himself. We’re seeing this model year after year, with films being made in the same spirit and going the distance, although we’re not going to see a repeat of the resounding success enjoyed by Flow every year.
Have industry challenges (funding, exhibition and export strategies, the Oscars race, etc.) altered the atmosphere in the animation sector, which has always stressed its family-friendly, fraternal and convivial side?
That family-friendly side is still there, but mostly in the short films universe, pretty much outside of the film industry’s financial and economic contingencies. When you enter into the world of feature films or television, it’s a whole other thing, in the sense that, currently, and more so now than ever, the boundaries between animation and live action are very porous. Lots of live action filmmakers flirt with animation, like Pablo Berger, Michel Hazanavicius, Richard Linklater obviously, and Bong Joon-ho who’s in the process of making a feature-length animation as we speak. There are dozens we could talk about, because it’s a phenomenon we’re seeing more and more often, for financial reasons relating to exportation, but also for aesthetic reasons and due to filmmakers’ particular visions. For example, the adaptation of the comic book Rogue Trooper by Duncan Jones (who’ll be at Annecy this year) was practically impossible to make in live action without a budget of over $200m. But generally speaking, it’s true that Annecy has grown to such an extent that the festival no longer has the family focus of the past, although we are trying to protect what’s left of it with a few events, like the filmmakers’ cocktail party, an evening reserved for directors, to allow them to connect, artist to artist, without producers, the press or distributors. But we also don’t want to go overboard with the glamour, and I’m not a supporter of the idea of bringing the red carpet to Annecy either, for example. We’re doing everything we can to preserve our uniqueness.
What’s your opinion on the emergence of AI in animation?
The first consequences are going to make themselves felt very quickly in terms of jobs in the field. For major productions with 300 to 500 names in their credits, there’s a whole range of tasks that are fairly laborious, and AI seems to be a solution in many people’s eyes. A festival director like me has no influence on the financial decisions made by huge companies who’ve already started to move in that direction. We’re having to contend with something that’s fairly inevitable, like the technological evolutions which previously transformed a whole range of industries. That said, I feel more directly concerned, as a festival programmer, when we talk about generative AI and films that are essentially produced and directed by AI. We see AI used a lot as a tool. Lots of directors who are real auteurs use it to resolve technical problems which seem unsolvable because they’re too complicated or too expensive. And lots of experimental filmmakers play with AI like they’ve always played with new gadgets: video cameras, 1960s computers, etc. They’re always going to fulfil that role of testing the limits, highlighting anomalies, etc. It’s when AI’s used by non-artists or sham artists that it gets a lot more troublesome, when it’s closer to plagiarism, to copy an aesthetic or a production; to incorporate it and turn it into a new version of the original. That’s really annoying. We’re pretty good at spotting those kinds of works for the time being, but it’s a worry for the future, because for how much longer are we going to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff?
(Translated from French)
